Problem statement

The financial services regulatory environment is becoming increasingly complex. Solutions that help streamline the regulatory environment are beneficial not only for regulators, but also for the regulated organizations and even for the economy as a whole. Bring your strategists, subject matter experts, developers and UX designers together for three days of purposeful interaction, and make your mark contributing to a more efficient Canadian regulatory ecosystem.

Examples include:

RegTech

KYC/Identity authentication

Financial Literacy

Capital markets

Judging criteria

Judging will be based on the following criteria, with equal weight assigned to each:

Creativity
Does your app create brand new, interesting or original use cases? We’re looking for the wow factor here. Just another app or bitcoin wallet won’t cut it, unless it has unique features we’ve never seen before.

Product
Does your app make regulatory systems more user friendly and approachable? How will it ease pain points in regulatory systems?

Execution
The devil is in the details. Does the app work well? Does it provide a good experience to the user? How does UX feel or the GUI look?

Maureen Jensen is the Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), which administers and enforces securities law in the capital markets of the province of Ontario.

Prior to her appointment as Chair and CEO, Ms. Jensen was the Executive Director and Chief Administrative Officer of the OSC. As the senior member of staff, she was responsible for coordinating and managing the organization’s day-to-day operations, including its enforcement, market regulation and compliance functions. In addition, she provided leadership and direction on policy development and implementation, as well as strategic securities, regulatory and enforcement policy and program analysis. Ms. Jensen was also an executive sponsor of various regulatory policy initiatives.

Before joining the OSC, Ms. Jensen was Senior Vice-President, Surveillance and Compliance at the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), the national self-regulatory organization that oversees all investment dealers and trading activity on debt and equity marketplaces in Canada. At IIROC, she was responsible for all of its compliance and market surveillance functions, including market surveillance and prudential and business conduct regulation of all registered dealers and registrants.

Prior to the formation of IIROC in 2008, Ms. Jensen was President and CEO of Market Regulation Services Inc. (RS), the independent national market regulation services provider for Canadian equity markets. At RS, she was responsible for overseeing all of its corporate and regulatory functions and the development of strategic initiatives that promote market integrity. During her tenure, Ms. Jensen also held the positions of Vice President, Market Surveillance, and later Vice President, Market Regulation Eastern Region.

Ms. Jensen has also held senior positions in regulatory and business portfolios at the Toronto Stock Exchange and had a 20-year career in the mining business, holding both executive and technical management positions with several resource companies.

Ms. Jensen is a Registered Professional Geoscientist (P.Geo) and holds the ICD.D designation.

Ethan Wilding is a co-founder of Ledger Labs, the leading Canadian blockchain-focussed firm with prominent clients in the Canadian financial services industry and a strong cyber security practice. He has been working in the blockchain space since late 2012, and held a foundational role with the Ethereum project and worked within the Ethereum Foundation intensely during its formative first year.

Ethan is also the Chair of the Certified Bitcoin Professional exam, one of the first not-for-profit programs of its kind in the field of blockchain technologies to establish a standard body of knowledge across industries and applications.

In addition to Ledger Labs, Ethan is working with experts on international affairs and humanitarian organizations to build a blockchain-based incentivized task management and campaign creation system that connects people with ways to support important causes that are practical and have demonstrable impact. The current beta is a pilot project to help offer additional tangible assistance to several dozen Syrian refugee families in Canada who have fled inconceivable violence in their homeland.

In 2010, Ethan earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy and taught philosophy at the Balsille School of International Affairs before leaving academia to focus his full-time efforts on blockchain startups.

Adam Felesky is the President and Managing Partner of Portag3 Ventures GP Inc. (“P3V”). P3V manages the Portag3 Ventures LP, an exclusive corporate fund sponsored by Power Financial Corporation, IGM Financial Inc. and Great West-Life. P3V makes early stage investments in companies focused on the wealth/asset management, personal finance, and insurance verticals.

Adam is the Founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Horizons Exchange Traded Funds., an exchange traded fund provider in Canada. Horizons ETFs is a leader in innovative ETF solutions including bringing the first leveraged and active ETF products to the Canadian market. Horizons launched over 70 ETFs during his tenure accumulating approximately $4.5 billion in assets under management.

Adam was also a director and founding investor of BetaShares Exchange Traded Funds in Australia which today manages over $3.0 in asset under management since its launch in 2010. Adam also led the launch of an ETF platform in Colombia.

A majority stake of Horizons Exchange Trade Funds was sold to Mirae Asset Global Investments (“MAGI”) in 2011 and in 2016 MAGI purchased the remaining interest.

Prior to founding Horizons Exchange Traded Funds, Adam worked in JPMorgan Derivative's group in New York, where he co-led the coverage for many of JPMorgan's top tier corporate clients amongst the oil & gas and power & utility sectors. Previously, Adam worked in investment banking for JPMorgan Canada and CIBC World Markets, respectively.

Adam testified at the U.S CFTC hearings on “Position Limits in Energy Futures Markets” in 2009.

Mr. Felesky was a two term member of the Ontario Securities Commission - Investment Funds Product Advisory Committee.

Mr. Felesky is actively involved with the DeGroote School of Business, including the donor of an annual full scholarship to a first year MBA student.

Adam is on the Board of Directors for the Immigration Access Fund which provides micro loans to professional immigrants seeking re-certification in Canada.

Doug Steiner is a leader in the field of financial services infrastructure and the design and use of economic and business models pertaining to information transfer.

He founded the Equity Derivatives group at RBC Capital in 1986. He designed and deployed the first fully electronic securities trading and options market-making platform in North America in 1989.

In 1992, he founded VERSUS Technologies Inc., a direct market access brokerage firm. In 1996 VERSUS licensed the rights to the E*TRADE service mark and technology for Canada. VERSUS/ E*TRADE Canada went public in 1999, and was sold to E*TRADE Group in 2000.

In 2002 Doug started the first private equity fund in Canada dedicated to financial services infrastructure. The fund reorganized into an operating company, Perimeter Financial in 2005. Perimeter developed and operated transparent securities trading and investment management infrastructure for institutional and retail clients. The firm was sold to CI Financial in April 2009.

Since 2004, Doug has been a writer and featured columnist in Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Magazine, Canada’s leading business publication. He comments on industry trends, economic analysis, and investor psychologies.

Doug is currently CEO of Evree Corp, www.evree.ca a financial software firm based in Toronto. He is also a partner in BEworks Inc, www.beworks.com., a consumer-focused behavioural economics consulting practice he co-founded with Dan Ariely from Duke University.

Chris is responsible for Zafin’s technology, engineering, digital applications, the development of an application ecosystem and investment in new technologies.

18 years of international experience in retail banking and strategy

Former Global Head of Retail Products and Digital at Standard Chartered, with oversight of all retail product businesses across 32 countries, as well as related technology and digital platforms

Faqs

Yes, though we have a limit of six members per team. You can bring your friends or you can team up with other hackers on site. However you choose to do it, be ready to hack!

Does the OSC own my hack?

No, all code is yours. This hackathon is for you to have some fun, meet great people and do some good.

Should I bring my pajamas?

Expect to stay overnight, so bring what you need to get through the hackathon. We’ll provide some sleep spaces for those who need some shut-eye. Remember you’re in a public forum, so please act accordingly. As for daytime dress, think casual and definitely no ties please!

Rules

Participants must be 18 years of age or older.

Eligible participants include teams of between two to six people.

Participants must register their interest by emailing vmalloy@osc.gov.on.ca by noon on November 23, 2016.

All submitted code must be created between 7 pm on November 25, 2016 and 9 am on November 27, 2016. Any participant or team who uses code that has been created before the hackathon start time will automatically be disqualified.

Participants can only contribute code toward their respective team and cannot share code, ideas or contribute code toward other teams.

Any designs created, code written, products built, presentations, marketing material etc., created during the hackathon will belong to creators of the codes/designs/content.

Event concludes

Developer
resources

INFURA provides a secure, stable, fault tolerant and scalable gateway to the public Ethereum and IPFS networks. It enables developers to access the blockchain and smart contracts via JSON-RPC method calls using the web3 standard libraries. The high-throughput transaction gateway handles millions of requests per day.

As the Internet-of-Things keeps expanding, the need for interoperability and sharing of resources become a necessity. IOTA enables companies to explore new business-2-business models by making every technological resource a potential service to be traded on an open market in real time, with no fees.

Nuco is a production-ready blockchain infrastructure technology that enables the creation of dedicated enterprise networks, and secure smart contract development for any industry and use case. Nuco specializes in high-performance developer tools and frameworks to make the process from prototype to production a reality for enterprises using blockchain technology.

The Open Bank Project is an open source API and App store for banks that empowers financial institutions to securely and rapidly enhance their digital offerings using an ecosystem of 3rd party applications and services.

Sia is a decentralized network consisting of many nodes around the world. Data is stored redundantly on a diverse subset of these nodes, meaning there’s no single or central point of failure. Sia was made to be integrated as your storage backend. You only pay for the storage you use, and there is no commitment.

Venue

Bitmaker

220 King Street West
Suite 200
Toronto, ON
M5H 1K4

Hosted by

Partners

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